Forbes Coaches Council Post: Is Your Perfectionism Helping Or Hurting You? Three Questions Women Can Ask To Find Out
Randi Braun is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council, where this post was first published on Forbes.com.
“And I’m telling you, nobody made that Taco Bell bathroom sparkle like I could.”
Working the night shift at the Taco Bell off Route 46 in Parsippany, New Jersey, was not the summer Michelle had envisioned for herself. A rising sophomore at Wellesley College, Michelle was thrilled to have her very first office job working as an intern in a fancy skyscraper. That was, of course, until the company went belly-up halfway through the summer.
That English literature degree at Wellesley was not going to pay for itself, which was how Michelle found herself working the night shift at a suburban Taco Bell. Her new office was nestled between a strip mall car wash and a Roy Rogers—quite the change from a desk that, just days before, was nestled between Legal and Marketing.
“It’s been a good life skill,” Michelle told me nearly 30 years later, now a partner in a law firm, “knowing how to fold a burrito, so everything doesn’t fall out.”
That wasn’t the only life skill Michelle learned that summer: It was also a crash course in the hidden cost of perfectionism and overachieving.
“Because I was the low man on the totem pole the first day,” Michelle recalls, “I had to do the really horrible stuff like washing all the dishes at the end of the night and cleaning the bathroom, which—at a place like Taco Bell, or really any public bathroom—is not the most fun job in the world.”
But she did it with enthusiasm and vigor. “Because I was an overachiever, I made sure that when I washed those dishes, that nobody’s ever scrubbed those pans as well as I did. When I cleaned the bathroom, it was like nobody had ever cleaned it the way I had—and I was proud of that.”
Michelle was sure that her hard work—and going the extra mile in service to her self-described perfectionism and overachieving—would be noticed and rewarded.
Well, it was certainly noticed, but it was not rewarded. The next day when she arrived, her manager told her, “Wow, that is the cleanest that bathroom has ever been. It’s so awesome that I want you to be the closing bathroom cleaner every night.”
A few weeks later when a new member of the team started, Michelle was excited about moving exclusively to the more glamorous parts of the job like manning the drive-thru window or working the taco line full-time. But things didn’t pan out like she hoped.
It was an example of how being a high achiever and wanting to do everything perfectly did not yield the results she liked or wanted. In fact, it backfired: She didn’t get to progress up the ladder. Her perfectionism made her stagnant. Management was blown away by the fact that she was the best bathroom cleaner they’d ever had, so they kept her there.
Yes, working hard is important. But what happens when we get stuck on bathroom duty in our work lives? It’s something millions of women grapple with daily, even once they’ve made their way up from cleaning duty to the proverbial “burrito bar.”
That’s why I want every high-performing woman to ask herself these three questions to shift her mindset when perfectionism is getting the best of her.
Are you minimizing failure or maximizing success?
Let’s be clear, these are very different things. When our perfectionism gets the best of us, we insidiously fall into a trap called “loss aversion”—a known psychological phenomenon where we start to make choices that help us minimize loss instead of maximize gain.
Are you “shoulding” all over yourself?
When you hear thoughts around “I should do...,” I want you to be suspicious of these thoughts rather than immediately submissive to them. Take a moment to pause and consider if the “shoulds” are actually serving you or driving you from a place of seeking external validation. As one of my coaching clients hilariously says when she catches herself doing this, “OMG, I cannot should all over myself at work... again!”
Are you caught in the “right choice” trap?
As you start to question your “shoulds,” you may fall into the losing game of trying to make the “right choice.” That’s why one of my favorite frameworks for ditching perfectionism comes from psychologist Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, who reminds us that in moments of overwhelm, it can be especially tempting to drive ourselves mad searching for the perfect answer. That’s also exactly the time, Lakshmin explains, when we must be on the lookout for the “right choice” trap because there often is no right choice. She elaborates, “When you find yourself mentally spinning in this way, recognize that you have a choice in how you react to and engage with your thoughts. For example, when you fixate on finding the right answer, try saying, ‘There goes my mind again, telling me there is a perfect answer.’ Drawing overt attention to your mind cultivates psychological flexibility, which gives you the emotional space to question whether this line of thinking is productive, or even realistic.” Identifying that we might be spinning into a “right choice” trap moment is the first step toward making a better choice.
It’s important to remember that our perfectionistic and overachieving habits often saddle us with the office housework—the non-essential, non-promotable work that happens in our workplaces, like ordering lunch, taking meeting notes, formatting the slide deck and organizing the birthday gift or happy hour (or in Michelle’s more literal case: cleaning the bathroom nightly).
Sure, being a team player is important, and somebody has to do each of these jobs in the workplace—but we’ve got a systemic issue on our hands when those somebodies are constantly women. Dr. Lise Vesterlund, a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, explains that women are 50% more likely than men to do office housework—with women of color taking on more office housework than any other population in the workplace.
Let's make decisions in service to our goals, not just office housework. Next time your perfectionism threatens to gets the best of you, check back in with these three questions to check yourself: is your perfectionism helping or hurting you?
Randi Braun is a certified executive coach and the author of Something Major: The New Playbook for Women at Work. Get in touch with Randi via email or social (below). Copyright 2023. All rights reserved.